Thursday, 11 September 2014

As the
Certification Review Project reaches its final stages, we need to provide some
additional updates on where we’re at and what we’re doing.

All four of
the project’s pilot case studies were completed by June and the reports are now
all available on the website. So far, we have only reported here on the
Ethiopia study, but you can now download and read the remaining three from the ‘all
document link’ on the certification page, or find them on the front page of the
website.

The project would like to thank Save the Children for hosting and providing resources and giing staff time for eth team in Pakistan. Staff provided open access to their policiers and procedures and were generous in sharing their time and opinions around how certification could improve their work.

We would also like to thank CARE Internationa (CARE) and Oxfam International (Oxfam) DRC Country offices for hosting the pilot case study in DRC. Oxfam provided transportation and logisitics support for the Kinshasa portion of the field research, and the bulk of the reseacrh was conducted in eastern DRC, where CARE provided transportation and logistics support and staff gave the study team full access to their policies, procedures and time.

Thanks are also due to Catholic Relief
Services (CRS), Caritas Switzerland and teams in Tacloban and Cebu and Caritas
Philippines (referred locally as NASSA) for hosting the study and facilitating
field visits and contacts with other stakeholders in the Philippines. We also appreciate
the role of CAFOD for its early commitment and support in the study.

Below are
some of the recommendations coming from individual
pilot studies. These ideas, comments and recommendations, in themselves, do not
convey the full extent and details of information shared, and are not
comprehensive.

These provide a small sample of what is
in the reports, below from Pakistan:

1.The model should clarify how the
assessment process will consider contextual issues that might affect an
organisation’s ability to fully meet the core requirements.

2.The project should share the detailed
findings of the draft core requirements and indicators with the CHS process so
that stakeholder’s views are considered in the subsequent drafts of the
standard.

3.Focus on the role of governments,
donors and UN agencies and the potential for alignment with existing processes
to promote accountability, quality and effectiveness in aid efforts.

Suggestions and recommendations emerging from the DRC:

1.Consider
using similar objectives and indicators, but with an alternative structure for
the model that is more familiar to humanitarian agencies and donors

2.Consider a
version of the model that can be more easily understood by disaster-affected
communities and have a more realistic “vision” of participation of communities
affected by disasters.

3.Focus more on
program support indicators that directly affect the quality and accountability
of the response.

5.Additional
field testing is needed, and the model needs to be more relevant to field staff
by, for example, contextualization by country and referencing the agency’s own
policies and codes (as long as they meet minimum humanitarian standards) and
providing a tool kit to help with implementation

Ideas and suggestions from the
Philippines:

1.Explore more ways to include local organisations. Numerous
suggestions were offered regarding ways to include them, and this means
capacity building in humanitarian action and programme management, and
exploring ways to help with the financial costs associated with certification.

2.Avoid creating an additional administrative burden as
organisations already spend significant time and resources fulfilling the
different administrative and reporting requirements of their donors and other
certification bodies. In fact, those who supported the model were often most
excited about the prospect of only having one set of requirements to follow.
For some, however, this does not seem probable.

3.Consider
expanding the model to include other humanitarian actors. Stakeholders
interviewed understand that it makes sense to begin with NGOs, but many
expressed strong feelings that it should be expanded to include other
humanitarian actors as soon as possible in order to have a larger impact on the
quality of humanitarian action.

The project team obviously found
widely differing opinions about certification and the sector’s priorities,
however, in the main, the proposal was received positively by stakeholders. The
final project outcomes, conclusions and recommendations must walk a fine line
amongst all of these in order to propose something that is realistic and
acceptable to the majority. Not an easy task!

The next steps of the project
will be to produce:

ØA finalised certification
model which includes the following: priority criteria; costs; how to fast track
certification to gain critical mass rapidly; how to manage high concurrent
demand; alternatives to the model which were considered and discarded and why.

ØAn analysis of the
implications of the proposed certification scheme from the perspective of
different stakeholders, including that of an INGO which has demonstrated its
compliance with InterAction’s Private Voluntary Organisation (PVO) Standard;
that of a national NGO which is HAP certified, that of an affected government
and that of a donor, to demonstrate what alignment with existing systems and
processes of quality assurance implies.

ØA proposed road map of what
needs to happen over the six months following the end of the project to
progress with certification.

The findings and recommendations will also be
presented at a conference in Copenhagen on 12th December 2014 - co-organised by
HAP and People In Aid, SPHERE and SCHR – at which the Core Humanitarian
Standards will also be launched. At this event, a proposal for taking action on
the findings on certification will be presented, which is intended to help
inform organisations’ decisions in relation to certification.

BROWSE BY DATE

About SCHR

The SCHR is a voluntary alliance of nine of the world’s leading humanitarian organisations. They share an aim to improve the quality, effectiveness, accountability and impact of aid efforts for people affected by crisis.